That's a pretty funny thing to say. Killing chickens may not "affect" the environment, but raising and killing 2 billion yearly certainly has a hell of a lot more environmental impact than tens of thousands of wild birds being killed by wind turbines.
After all, where does the feed for the chickens come from? Very often, genetically modified soybean is used for this purpose. Where does the chicken droppings go? The meat industry (poultry, cattle, hog) has plenty of problems with waste produced by animals we raise for food. The gigantic cess-lagoons created for "treatment" of the waste produces toxic gasses that are lethal for many animals and causes serious long-term health damage for people who live within miles. The noxious chemicals seep into and pollute groundwater. This is not to mention the antibiotics, hormones and other chemicals given to these animals during their lifetime to ward off disease and increase their growth rate to "improve yield", which eventually find their way into our own bodies as we consume them.
Nor does it take into account large meat industry corporations have driven small farmer out of business, making it only viable for most of them to raise the animals on contract for the large corporations. They buy the chicks, buy the feed, the antibiotics, etc., from the companies that eventually will buy the mature chickens back, using up and polluting their own land, so that the meat indusrty don't have to take the risk of having polluted land to clean up.
So...if you were concerned about the environment, and I grant you that wind turbine's effects are not negligible on wildlife. But it seems hardly comparable, doesn't it?
Of course, if it was chickens, we wouldn't care so much, would we? After all, we kill over 2 billion chickens yearly for food, and somehow that doesn't seem to concern too many people. Or maybe it's whether the birds being killed are edible or not? Or is it whether or not the species is endangered? Or maybe it's our perception of the birds? Golden eagles are "noble" where as chickens are just dumb birds that are suited only for eating and mistreating - cramming chickens into tiny little cages so that they trample each other to death, cutting off their beaks so they don't peck each other to death because of the crowded, conditions, etc.
No, it's not just any bird, but it's birds that we like that we are concerned about, isn't it? Doesn't it also apply to people too? We have the same biases and valuations of people depending on who they are, where they're from, etc.
1. Do you ever use your email like an instant messenger? Meaning, do you and another person sit there writing messages to each other in almost real-time? You sit there pathetically pressing refresh or check email, waiting for the next reply? I have.
2. A control panel for monitoring information flow is not a bad idea - just that it needs to be implemented to cover everything and be easy to use. You should be able to easily define rules (like spam rules) that says what to do with the messages if they meet certain criteria. Of course, it defeats the purpose of IM - after all, if you don't want to be available, or just don't want to be interrupted, just turn the thing off!
3. I think that instead of finding a technical solution (yet another program that will cure all, bring world peace, and improve worker productivity - remember that's what they said about email? Instead of all of these, just sit down and take some time and figure out the best routine for yourself. Everybody has different work habits, and a control panel, no matter how flexible, is not going to accommodate everyone's requirements. If you don't want to be interrupted, then just turn those notifications off, change your IM status to "away" or "do not interrupt"
4. Some workers don't "want" to be productive. They want to be interrupted.
If the whole point of Open Source was to make sure that people "give back" then it would have failed long ago. The whole point was that here was the source, and everybody in the world can get at it, no strings attached except for the license requirements.
Has Open Source benefitted from these corporate "leeches" that just take and take and never give back? Of course, even if just a little. If there was a problem with the software, then if the company that is using the software feel that it's important that it be fixed, then they will either bitch about it until someone does, or they will switch software, or perhaps, once in a long while, they might have someone contribute to fixing it. But in any of those cases, bad software that are not actively maintained go away. Good software that a lot of users, corporate or othrewise, find useful, will get a large community of users that will use it, possibly complain about it, but if they stay with it, they are contributing to it.
Open Source is not always about the code, though it is by far the most visible aspect of it. The important thing is to realize contribution comes in many forms, and software, after all, is no good if there are no users for it. If you are using a piece of Open Source software, and you find it useful and continue to use it, you are already contributing. Anyone who believes money, development, testing or documentation should be required contribution in any way is just looking too narrowly.
Ah...that would be the problem. I am from New York, where everything is noisy and dirty. I have come to expect noisy cars buses, and especially subway trains.
Actually, of course, less noise is always better. I am merely raising the issue as something that people need to be aware of. It is not a negative at all that the bus runs quietly.
But I think the problem in the parking lot is that they are not design well for pedestrians. Meaning, many parking lots don't have a place where people can walk in the middle, away from traffic. In some places, this is where the light poles and signs are located. But when people who park the car are walking in the same area where people are driving around to and from the parking spots, then a quiet car can be dangerous. How many times have you started backing up, only to slam on the brakes when you suddenly see someone walking into view of your mirrors?
This is still not the car's problem for being silent of course.
...can be bad because of its lack of noise, there's less warnings to the pedestrians that the bus is coming. It may seem like a silly problem, but the next time you walk on the streets, check to see how often you use the sound as a cue to determine when a car is coming. Of course, you'd still look to be sure, but for jaywalkers, it could be a bad thing.
The other thing is, since the motor is now the wheel, I wonder what the costs will be to maintain these wheels. I think it's still better to have traditional electric motors with the rotor on the inside, since there's really not that much to gain from having an inside out motor, and more to lose when you need to get at it to fix it. Using traditional motors rather than the inside-out motor also means less change need to be made, since the wheels and tires can be used from currently available parts.
As some have pointed out, if those things happen, your data and their guarantee are the least of your problem. However, it might be that "known to man" means "having been experienced by man", not "having knowledge of by man". So, while we have knowledge of those forces, we have not experienced them.
one observation I had when I was in Japan (Tokyo, specifically), was how everything was mostly done in cash, and I never saw a single person using credit card. That's not to say it doesn't exist, of course, but it seemed to me, a visitor, that Japanese are much more comfortable using cash for transactions, and credit card usage is not nearly as common as in the U.S.
That being said, then I wonder if they will take to the "smart card cell phone for financial transactions" thing readily. Most people do have phones, and the large number of vending machines and pay phones, and rail ticket machines that uses cash makes it unlikely that the people will abandon cash at all. So, unless they get to use this on the ticket machines and the millions of "conveniently placed and available everywhere" vending machines, I suspect it will not fly.
It is not the tool that makes people dumb, it is the people using the tool.
Hey, remember this one? "Guns don't kill people, people do".
Why do people insist on blaming the tool instead of the people who wield them?
Perhaps (and this is where I betray my bias against sales people), it is sales people who started using Powerpoint in simple gloss-over-all-details-in-a-strategy-to-confuse-an d-misinform strategies that started the whole problem?
This is the same problem when people start blaming Windows for every little problem, some of which, of course are well deserved, but it merely shifts the blame from proper responsible network/system administration to the product itself.
Or is it that Microsoft is evil because it is hellbent on creating these simpler tools that don't do enough to prevent people from doing stupid things with them? Or is it that because the tools are easy to use it attracts stupid people to use them instead of using another set of tools that are harder to use and therefore requires more thought and effort?
Quite frankly, it's not just Powerpoint, it could have been any other slideshow presentation program. That Powerpoint is the most commonly used slideshow presentation program made by the evil Microsoft makes it an easy target.
If the proper information was not communicated by the slides, maybe, just MAYBE the people who created them are to blame? Maybe?
Hate to tell you, telemarketers are already using VoIP to lower the costs and doing it overseas. They don't have to wait for telcos to do that. My company, though not a telemarketing company, but has call center presence in other countries, make extensive use of VoIP.
The lack of refrigeration does seem kind of odd, given that we always hear that space is "cold"
However, thinking about it some more, I guess it's because of the relative vacuum of space that makes it more like a gigantic insulator - if you have heat on the ISS, it'd be difficult to dissipate it because there is no medium to carry the heat away. At least, I think that's what might be the case.
it isn't so much that it's a nice sleek design that makes everyone - not just geeks - lust after it. Partly, it's the higher, mass-perceived "premium" price tag that makes people think it's better. The iPod is a well-design little gadget, but hardly the best, nor the most cost effective. No, the iPod is successful because it is part of a complete marketed solution.
You want to listen to MP3s you ripped from CDs? no problem. You want to listen to MP3s you downloaded from IRC/Usenet/? Sure. If you are a regular consumer who is not tech savvy, who don't know where to get MP3s, you can now purchase from the iTunes store, and get legally, and worry-free, the music files that you'd like. Hate to break this to you - not everyone LIKES to download MP3s illegally - especially those who can afford to pay for it. Those who cannot afford to, or just plain don't want to, well, they have to turn to illegal means.
So what Apple has done is say, look, we have a complete solution for you. You can easily go anywhere with this iPod thing, it's pretty, it's "premium", and we will make it easy for you to get MP3s without worry about legal issues, without having to know how to rip CDs, without having to know how to download MP3s illegally using P2P programs, which may contain malware and cause you to share files that you are not aware of which can then get you sued by RIAA.
The RIAA's suits' merit notwithstanding, people just don't want to even take a chance that they'd be put into that position (which is exactly RIAA's scare tactic).
And that, is the greatness of iPod. It's not the device itself, it's the whole thing.
Pretty soon, a little handheld gadget will be all of these: - PDA - Cell Phone - Digital Camera - Video player - portable mass storage - MP3 Player - advanced graphing calculator...there're so many, what have I missed?
You can bet something like this will not be allowed during test taking, that's for sure.
The market is larger from the perspective of the vendors, because it enables them to reach customers they could not reach (or would have been more expensive to reach).
The Internet lowered the the barrier of entry to participate in a larger marketplace. Or, you may consider it as participation in more marketplaces. From the perspective of the vendor though, the effect is basically the same.
The Internet, if anything, empowers capitalism even more precisely because of this kind of thing. The Internet enlarges the market, making it possible to compete at a level like never before by eliminating geographic boundaries (to an extent) and reduce localization of markets.
Why do these kinds of exclamations make it into the story anyway? I thought there were editors for these things....oh wait, this is slashdot, nevermind.
Yes, there are quite a few young boy characters that are voiced by women. More than you might think. That's also because they usually don't use children, unlike in the U.S., where dubbing can often involve children.
So, again, unnatural voices in Japan - women doing the voice of little girls and young boys. Nothing wrong with it - though after a while, I think of it as natural. Anime voices seem to match their characters a lot better than the dub actors do - but I think that's also a casting issue.
I personally agree with you that I prefer the original work, because the character includes the original voice. I prefer it a lot more.
In Japan, women talk in their normal voices, which is very different from the anime characters. Western dub actors/actresses don't usually go through that kind of effort. Not only that, it would sound really strange too....kind of like operas in English (yes, I know some can be decent, but let's face it, opera is better in Italian, Spanish or French, perhaps even German)
I personally like the natural voice Japanes characters more - including the young girl actors. To that end, I liked most of Miyazaki's films' character voices. But for wacky and unbearably cute girl characters, you expect the really high-piched voices.
And it's not so much how long I've lived in Japan (only several months, over the course of years), but how much anime I've watched (a lot, but by no means am I the most fanatic of anime fans, who have watched far more than I have).
I have to say that I didn't enjoy Nausicaa as much as I'd like, though I do think it's more powerful than Princess Mononoke. The reason that I didn't enjoy it so much was because I had read the manga, which is a whole lot better. The story makes more sense and is more complete. It's really the same problem that Akira had - the anime movie came out in the middle of the manga story, and the manga story is so huge that they had to modify it for a feature length film, and the story suffers a great deal because of it.
Princess Mononoke, on the other hand, was probably created from the beginning to be set in a feature length film, so it doesn't suffer as much from the slightly disjointedness of Nausicaa from having the cram so much into so little time.
Read the manga - it's been translated into English and on sale for years. I highly recommend it. One of the rare Miyazaki manga too.
Not only do many people have trouble reading fast enough, some people (a great number of them) have trouble because of dyslexia.
On the other hand, it's not so much that the dubs are bad as it is that often the Japanese voice actors use unnatural voices for the characters. Almost all young/teen girl voices are done this way. You look at some of these "the making of..." specials and you watch this little girl voice come out of a twenty something Japanese voice actress....it's weird.
English dubbing voice actors/actresses don't do this, of course. So those of use who are used to the unnatural voices of the anime characters get completely discombobulated by the difference in voice pitch.
Though it must be said, also, that Disney was one of the first ones to have done it - witness Snow White's voice - though I think the voice actress for Snow White didn't force it too much - her voice was already pretty high and girly.
Whether a dubbed anime will work depends also largely on the type of anime and how the characters are designed. With more serious or "adult" animes, dubbed voices actually work fine. I think that Cowboy Bebop dubbed was pretty good because of this. Of course, if you have "cute" looking girls in the anime, and then this deep western woman's voice come out, it's natural to think it's mismatched.
In Princess Mononoke, for example, Minnie Driver's rendition of Lady Eboshi's voice was a good match for the character.
Slashdot Mirror
Who says Microsoft has failed to provide support for Hebrew? They even have a Hebrew version of the Office home page!
That's a pretty funny thing to say. Killing chickens may not "affect" the environment, but raising and killing 2 billion yearly certainly has a hell of a lot more environmental impact than tens of thousands of wild birds being killed by wind turbines.
After all, where does the feed for the chickens come from? Very often, genetically modified soybean is used for this purpose. Where does the chicken droppings go? The meat industry (poultry, cattle, hog) has plenty of problems with waste produced by animals we raise for food. The gigantic cess-lagoons created for "treatment" of the waste produces toxic gasses that are lethal for many animals and causes serious long-term health damage for people who live within miles. The noxious chemicals seep into and pollute groundwater. This is not to mention the antibiotics, hormones and other chemicals given to these animals during their lifetime to ward off disease and increase their growth rate to "improve yield", which eventually find their way into our own bodies as we consume them.
Nor does it take into account large meat industry corporations have driven small farmer out of business, making it only viable for most of them to raise the animals on contract for the large corporations. They buy the chicks, buy the feed, the antibiotics, etc., from the companies that eventually will buy the mature chickens back, using up and polluting their own land, so that the meat indusrty don't have to take the risk of having polluted land to clean up.
So...if you were concerned about the environment, and I grant you that wind turbine's effects are not negligible on wildlife. But it seems hardly comparable, doesn't it?
Of course, if it was chickens, we wouldn't care so much, would we? After all, we kill over 2 billion chickens yearly for food, and somehow that doesn't seem to concern too many people. Or maybe it's whether the birds being killed are edible or not? Or is it whether or not the species is endangered? Or maybe it's our perception of the birds? Golden eagles are "noble" where as chickens are just dumb birds that are suited only for eating and mistreating - cramming chickens into tiny little cages so that they trample each other to death, cutting off their beaks so they don't peck each other to death because of the crowded, conditions, etc.
No, it's not just any bird, but it's birds that we like that we are concerned about, isn't it? Doesn't it also apply to people too? We have the same biases and valuations of people depending on who they are, where they're from, etc.
1. Do you ever use your email like an instant messenger? Meaning, do you and another person sit there writing messages to each other in almost real-time? You sit there pathetically pressing refresh or check email, waiting for the next reply? I have.
2. A control panel for monitoring information flow is not a bad idea - just that it needs to be implemented to cover everything and be easy to use. You should be able to easily define rules (like spam rules) that says what to do with the messages if they meet certain criteria.
Of course, it defeats the purpose of IM - after all, if you don't want to be available, or just don't want to be interrupted, just turn the thing off!
3. I think that instead of finding a technical solution (yet another program that will cure all, bring world peace, and improve worker productivity - remember that's what they said about email? Instead of all of these, just sit down and take some time and figure out the best routine for yourself. Everybody has different work habits, and a control panel, no matter how flexible, is not going to accommodate everyone's requirements. If you don't want to be interrupted, then just turn those notifications off, change your IM status to "away" or "do not interrupt"
4. Some workers don't "want" to be productive. They want to be interrupted.
If the whole point of Open Source was to make sure that people "give back" then it would have failed long ago. The whole point was that here was the source, and everybody in the world can get at it, no strings attached except for the license requirements.
Has Open Source benefitted from these corporate "leeches" that just take and take and never give back? Of course, even if just a little. If there was a problem with the software, then if the company that is using the software feel that it's important that it be fixed, then they will either bitch about it until someone does, or they will switch software, or perhaps, once in a long while, they might have someone contribute to fixing it. But in any of those cases, bad software that are not actively maintained go away. Good software that a lot of users, corporate or othrewise, find useful, will get a large community of users that will use it, possibly complain about it, but if they stay with it, they are contributing to it.
Open Source is not always about the code, though it is by far the most visible aspect of it. The important thing is to realize contribution comes in many forms, and software, after all, is no good if there are no users for it. If you are using a piece of Open Source software, and you find it useful and continue to use it, you are already contributing. Anyone who believes money, development, testing or documentation should be required contribution in any way is just looking too narrowly.
Ah...that would be the problem. I am from New York, where everything is noisy and dirty. I have come to expect noisy cars buses, and especially subway trains.
Actually, of course, less noise is always better. I am merely raising the issue as something that people need to be aware of. It is not a negative at all that the bus runs quietly.
But I think the problem in the parking lot is that they are not design well for pedestrians. Meaning, many parking lots don't have a place where people can walk in the middle, away from traffic. In some places, this is where the light poles and signs are located. But when people who park the car are walking in the same area where people are driving around to and from the parking spots, then a quiet car can be dangerous. How many times have you started backing up, only to slam on the brakes when you suddenly see someone walking into view of your mirrors?
This is still not the car's problem for being silent of course.
You don't need an rotating axle either way. If you have 4 independent motors, they don't need to have large heavy rotating axles.
...can be bad because of its lack of noise, there's less warnings to the pedestrians that the bus is coming. It may seem like a silly problem, but the next time you walk on the streets, check to see how often you use the sound as a cue to determine when a car is coming. Of course, you'd still look to be sure, but for jaywalkers, it could be a bad thing.
The other thing is, since the motor is now the wheel, I wonder what the costs will be to maintain these wheels. I think it's still better to have traditional electric motors with the rotor on the inside, since there's really not that much to gain from having an inside out motor, and more to lose when you need to get at it to fix it. Using traditional motors rather than the inside-out motor also means less change need to be made, since the wheels and tires can be used from currently available parts.
As some have pointed out, if those things happen, your data and their guarantee are the least of your problem. However, it might be that "known to man" means "having been experienced by man", not "having knowledge of by man". So, while we have knowledge of those forces, we have not experienced them.
I thought a long time ago, why not make distributed computing applications as Java Applets hosted on web servers?
Pros:
- Nothing to "install".
- Cross platform (write it once, run it everywhere, right?)
- Easy to use (just browse)
Cons:
- Speed.
- Full featured screen saver not possible?
- uh...speed?
one observation I had when I was in Japan (Tokyo, specifically), was how everything was mostly done in cash, and I never saw a single person using credit card. That's not to say it doesn't exist, of course, but it seemed to me, a visitor, that Japanese are much more comfortable using cash for transactions, and credit card usage is not nearly as common as in the U.S.
That being said, then I wonder if they will take to the "smart card cell phone for financial transactions" thing readily. Most people do have phones, and the large number of vending machines and pay phones, and rail ticket machines that uses cash makes it unlikely that the people will abandon cash at all. So, unless they get to use this on the ticket machines and the millions of "conveniently placed and available everywhere" vending machines, I suspect it will not fly.
It is not the tool that makes people dumb, it is the people using the tool.
n d-misinform strategies that started the whole problem?
Hey, remember this one? "Guns don't kill people, people do".
Why do people insist on blaming the tool instead of the people who wield them?
Perhaps (and this is where I betray my bias against sales people), it is sales people who started using Powerpoint in simple gloss-over-all-details-in-a-strategy-to-confuse-a
This is the same problem when people start blaming Windows for every little problem, some of which, of course are well deserved, but it merely shifts the blame from proper responsible network/system administration to the product itself.
Or is it that Microsoft is evil because it is hellbent on creating these simpler tools that don't do enough to prevent people from doing stupid things with them? Or is it that because the tools are easy to use it attracts stupid people to use them instead of using another set of tools that are harder to use and therefore requires more thought and effort?
Quite frankly, it's not just Powerpoint, it could have been any other slideshow presentation program. That Powerpoint is the most commonly used slideshow presentation program made by the evil Microsoft makes it an easy target.
If the proper information was not communicated by the slides, maybe, just MAYBE the people who created them are to blame? Maybe?
Yes. Vonage does exactly this. Although it can work over cable as well.
Hate to tell you, telemarketers are already using VoIP to lower the costs and doing it overseas. They don't have to wait for telcos to do that. My company, though not a telemarketing company, but has call center presence in other countries, make extensive use of VoIP.
The lack of refrigeration does seem kind of odd, given that we always hear that space is "cold"
However, thinking about it some more, I guess it's because of the relative vacuum of space that makes it more like a gigantic insulator - if you have heat on the ISS, it'd be difficult to dissipate it because there is no medium to carry the heat away. At least, I think that's what might be the case.
it isn't so much that it's a nice sleek design that makes everyone - not just geeks - lust after it. Partly, it's the higher, mass-perceived "premium" price tag that makes people think it's better. The iPod is a well-design little gadget, but hardly the best, nor the most cost effective. No, the iPod is successful because it is part of a complete marketed solution.
You want to listen to MP3s you ripped from CDs? no problem. You want to listen to MP3s you downloaded from IRC/Usenet/? Sure. If you are a regular consumer who is not tech savvy, who don't know where to get MP3s, you can now purchase from the iTunes store, and get legally, and worry-free, the music files that you'd like. Hate to break this to you - not everyone LIKES to download MP3s illegally - especially those who can afford to pay for it. Those who cannot afford to, or just plain don't want to, well, they have to turn to illegal means.
So what Apple has done is say, look, we have a complete solution for you. You can easily go anywhere with this iPod thing, it's pretty, it's "premium", and we will make it easy for you to get MP3s without worry about legal issues, without having to know how to rip CDs, without having to know how to download MP3s illegally using P2P programs, which may contain malware and cause you to share files that you are not aware of which can then get you sued by RIAA.
The RIAA's suits' merit notwithstanding, people just don't want to even take a chance that they'd be put into that position (which is exactly RIAA's scare tactic).
And that, is the greatness of iPod. It's not the device itself, it's the whole thing.
More like the majority of the people pay rent or licensing fees to the few people possessing everything.
So, basically, a personal heating unit (AKA hot water bottle for the information age) to keep yourself warm in the cold weather.
Pretty soon, a little handheld gadget will be all of these: ...there're so many, what have I missed?
- PDA
- Cell Phone
- Digital Camera
- Video player
- portable mass storage
- MP3 Player
- advanced graphing calculator
You can bet something like this will not be allowed during test taking, that's for sure.
The market is larger from the perspective of the vendors, because it enables them to reach customers they could not reach (or would have been more expensive to reach).
The Internet lowered the the barrier of entry to participate in a larger marketplace. Or, you may consider it as participation in more marketplaces. From the perspective of the vendor though, the effect is basically the same.
The Internet, if anything, empowers capitalism even more precisely because of this kind of thing. The Internet enlarges the market, making it possible to compete at a level like never before by eliminating geographic boundaries (to an extent) and reduce localization of markets.
Why do these kinds of exclamations make it into the story anyway? I thought there were editors for these things....oh wait, this is slashdot, nevermind.
Yes, there are quite a few young boy characters that are voiced by women. More than you might think. That's also because they usually don't use children, unlike in the U.S., where dubbing can often involve children.
So, again, unnatural voices in Japan - women doing the voice of little girls and young boys. Nothing wrong with it - though after a while, I think of it as natural. Anime voices seem to match their characters a lot better than the dub actors do - but I think that's also a casting issue.
I personally agree with you that I prefer the original work, because the character includes the original voice. I prefer it a lot more.
In Japan, women talk in their normal voices, which is very different from the anime characters. Western dub actors/actresses don't usually go through that kind of effort. Not only that, it would sound really strange too....kind of like operas in English (yes, I know some can be decent, but let's face it, opera is better in Italian, Spanish or French, perhaps even German)
I personally like the natural voice Japanes characters more - including the young girl actors. To that end, I liked most of Miyazaki's films' character voices. But for wacky and unbearably cute girl characters, you expect the really high-piched voices.
And it's not so much how long I've lived in Japan (only several months, over the course of years), but how much anime I've watched (a lot, but by no means am I the most fanatic of anime fans, who have watched far more than I have).
I have to say that I didn't enjoy Nausicaa as much as I'd like, though I do think it's more powerful than Princess Mononoke. The reason that I didn't enjoy it so much was because I had read the manga, which is a whole lot better. The story makes more sense and is more complete. It's really the same problem that Akira had - the anime movie came out in the middle of the manga story, and the manga story is so huge that they had to modify it for a feature length film, and the story suffers a great deal because of it.
Princess Mononoke, on the other hand, was probably created from the beginning to be set in a feature length film, so it doesn't suffer as much from the slightly disjointedness of Nausicaa from having the cram so much into so little time.
Read the manga - it's been translated into English and on sale for years. I highly recommend it. One of the rare Miyazaki manga too.
Not only do many people have trouble reading fast enough, some people (a great number of them) have trouble because of dyslexia.
On the other hand, it's not so much that the dubs are bad as it is that often the Japanese voice actors use unnatural voices for the characters. Almost all young/teen girl voices are done this way. You look at some of these "the making of..." specials and you watch this little girl voice come out of a twenty something Japanese voice actress....it's weird.
English dubbing voice actors/actresses don't do this, of course. So those of use who are used to the unnatural voices of the anime characters get completely discombobulated by the difference in voice pitch.
Though it must be said, also, that Disney was one of the first ones to have done it - witness Snow White's voice - though I think the voice actress for Snow White didn't force it too much - her voice was already pretty high and girly.
Whether a dubbed anime will work depends also largely on the type of anime and how the characters are designed. With more serious or "adult" animes, dubbed voices actually work fine. I think that Cowboy Bebop dubbed was pretty good because of this. Of course, if you have "cute" looking girls in the anime, and then this deep western woman's voice come out, it's natural to think it's mismatched.
In Princess Mononoke, for example, Minnie Driver's rendition of Lady Eboshi's voice was a good match for the character.